The Power of your Friendships: Having a close friend means you feel less stressed and find it easier to stick to healthy habits. And, most important, you always have someone to answer the "am I crazy?" question

Novelist Patricia O'Brien still remembers a stressful time years ago when she'd come home from work at a Chicago newspaper, crawl into bed and telephone her friend, Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, for a long chat.

"I'd call her for an answer to the 'am I crazy?' question," she recalls. "Or when I needed a reality check or wanted to know whether I was on the right track. You can't ask those questions of many people. It has to be a friend who knows you well and is brave enough to risk telling you the truth."

O'Brien and Goodman's own 27-year friendship inspired their book I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women's Lives (Simon & Schuster, 2000), but its message is universal. "The need to understand and be understood is very powerful in women's lives," Goodman says. "Without intimates, without the people who 'get us,' life would be unbearably lonely."

It would also be less healthy. A faithful friend is the medicine of life, the ancients wrote, and modern scientists agree. "The strongest predictor of a woman's health is the quality of her relationships," says Dana Crowley Jack, Ed.D., a professor of interdisciplinary studies and expert on women's health at Western Washington University in Bellingham who has found that friendships help women out of depression. "It's critical that we have at least one relationship within which we can totally be ourselves, and for many women, it is easiest to do that with a woman friend."

In fact, there's almost no aspect of your health -- mental and physical -- that isn't improved by a caring, empathetic friendship. "A close friend is like a slightly flattering mirror," says Sandy Sheehy, author of Connecting: The Enduring Power of Female Friendships (William Morrow, 2000). "Because she respects and admires you, she reflects back an image of a strong, healthy woman. Her respect and admiration encourage you to stick with the habits that will keep you strong and healthy."

Take stress, for example, a big risk to your good health: "Friends are great at reducing each other's frustration and anxiety," Sheehy says. "A simple acknowledgement of the source of your stress -- 'Your boss is hard on you' -- is often enough to make you feel better."

Friendship can also boost physical fitness, Sheehy says. When we work out with a good friend, we exercise more often than we would otherwise. "The exercise is more fun, and fun itself is restorative, especially when you share it with someone around whom you're not afraid to relax and act silly."

But good friends are more than good medicine; they are guides to our development. With an intimate friend, Jack says, "we can see the world through someone else's eyes, learn how she deals with problems, setbacks and successes. We can share our feelings, practice honesty, experience anger or disappointment -- and then talk about it!"

Girl talk is essential

Talk, or intimate conversation, is in fact the essence of female friendship, while the opposite is true of most male friendships. Rather than confide in each other, men tend to do things together. While women delve into relationships, telling secrets, revealing something profoundly personal, male buddies are generally busy with a mutual activity and talk is likely to be about something impersonal, like sports, current events or work. "If you had a camera, you could videotape the gender gap," say Goodman and O'Brien in their book, "Women touch each other more, they sit closer together, focus on one-to-one sharing."

If we women have a power source, a place we plug into to keep a friendship up and humming, it's the heart-to-heart conversation. That's where we get validation for our feelings. Sitting face to face with our friends is best, but failing that, we talk to each other with ears glued to a cellphone or with fingers flying as we type our instant messages. Like Goodman and O'Brien say in their book, we use our talks to "hear each other out, take each other seriously, care and feel cared for."

Don't break up!

Making yourself available for this ongoing, sustaining dialogue is easy when the friendship is convenient: when you're both school chums, say, or young mothers raising children. It becomes harder as you head in opposite directions. "Friends in it for the long haul expect that things will change along the way, that they'll adjust and adapt," say Goodman and O'Brien.

Flexibility is especially important in a friendship that starts early in life. New York artist Ghilia Lipman-Wulf, 32, remembers the passion of early adolescent "crushes" when a friend "figured so deeply in your life that every emotion had to be shared and discussed." As people grow and change, the friendship must grow and change as well. Lipman-Wulf has known Giulia Cox, 32, since they were at Bronx High School of Science. They both still live in the New York City area, but while Cox works in the Bronx as an assistant principal at a public school, Lipman-Wulf travels often to Europe to visit her family. Today, Lipman-Wulf says, "My world often doesn't remotely intersect with Giulia's, but despite being a continent away, we retain a strong emotional and intellectual connection." (See "Bonds That Last" box.)